Domain of the Dead

by Iain McKinnon

  With a loud whoosh the closest assailant’s head disintegrated. The force of the bullet’s impact carried the cadaver’s body away from Elspeth. A second shot rung out and chunks of flesh and bone erupted from the second zombie’s temple. The shot had grazed the side of the cadaver’s head, obliterating a wedge of skull and exposing the wet brain matter underneath. Undeterred by the wound, the zombie sunk its reaming teeth into Elspeth’s clavicle.

  Pain burst through Elspeth’s mind. Her legs buckled and she fell to the ground, still clutching the bundle in her arms.

  The zombie fell upon her, clawing, scratching and biting.

  Nathan shoved the shriveled husk he was wrestling with out of the way and turned to help Elspeth. With one swift kick he dislodged the attacker and dragged Elspeth to her feet.

  “Hurry!” Ryan bellowed as he grabbed Elspeth’s arm, adding his own strength to Nathan’s.

  * * *

  Sarah dodged and barged her way through the shambling corpses. Some of the bodies yielded to her momentum with sickening squelches. Occasionally decaying lumps of flesh would fly free as she shoved past. She could taste the decay halfway down her throat, dry, rasping and musty. It lingered in just the part that made her want to gag.

  All the while, shots were ringing out with a steady pulse as if set by a metronome. Sometimes the corpses in front of her would sink to the ground with a round to the head as an unknown marksman cleared a path for her. Like throwing salt on snow, the zombies before her were melting away. But Sarah knew it wasn’t enough to hold back the blizzard.

  She turned onto the town square and ran hard into a body. A gloved hand steadied her.

  “Get to the chopper!” Cahz used his hand around the girl’s arm to propel her onwards to the waiting helicopter. He said, “Cannon, watch my six,” but knew his old friend would have already anticipated this.

  “Sure thing, boss.” Cannon positioned himself a few paces away from his commander and readied his huge machine gun.

  Cahz raised his carbine and started placing shots into the zombies.

  Shot after shot rang out as Cahz, Angel and Bates fired into the horde of undead. Dozens fell only to have their place filled by dozens more. From all over the lifeless city, more and more of its former inhabitants were drawn out by the noise.

  Bates swept round, casting his gaze around his imagined borders. He felt the wind from the chopper’s idling blades against his back. His means of escape sat just a few metres away, but he wouldn’t let himself become complacent. He focused his attention on the approaching zombies. His line of death was denoted by the corpses he had dispatched, a neat circle around the landing zone.

  Bates fired and kept tally as he did. “Twenty-eight. Twenty-nine. Thirty…”

  He counted off the last round in the clip. As he reloaded he took stock. His neat circle of corpses was being overwhelmed. The rate at which they crossed the line was increasing as more and more were drawn in by the noise Bates and his companions were making. He knew he couldn’t keep the creatures at a distance much longer. Although Cahz and Cannon were now covering half of his original kill zone, the sheer volume of zombies would mean he couldn’t shoot them all. Even if he had an infinite amount of ammunition, the time it took to aim at targets coupled with reloading meant that he would eventually be overrun. Bates estimated that at this rate he’d run out of ammo in the next three minutes.

  He took a look over his shoulder at the waiting helicopter. It was only a quick jog away. He’d be there in a few seconds. But he still felt uneasy.

  He looked back at the encroaching crowd of walking dead. He took aim and dispatched the latest cadaver to cross the line.

  * * *

  Nathan could feel Elspeth becoming heavy. “Come on, Elspeth. We’re almost there. We can make it.”

  The old woman looked deathly pale, like the creatures around her. She looked up at Nathan with sleepy eyes.

  Nathan looked down at the bundle in her arms. “Do it for your granddaughter.”

  Her tired old muscles filled with energy again and Elspeth pushed on.

  * * *

  “Keep going down to the chopper!” Cahz called out to the two men supporting the old woman as they lolloped past.

  Cahz looked down the busy street. Hundreds of zombies shambled their way towards him. He peered through the throng, trying to get a glimpse of the other survivors. There was a blur of movement and Cahz spotted a man with a shaggy black beard wielding a metal pipe.

  Cahz lent into his rifle butt and started thinning out the zombies in the survivors’ position. A break in the mob revealed the dark haired man again. His fist clenched around the pipe as he pounded the zombies around him.

  Cahz fired on either side of the man. Through the tunnel view of his sight he could see the man’s face sprayed with blood. Pushing the image aside, Cahz continued shooting the zombies.

  His scope went black. Cahz pulled back to see just yards in front of him a zombie had stepped into his line of sight. Its arms stretched out, ready to make a grab for him. It was so close that Cahz could read the blanched employee name tag on the shop worker’s apron.

  Cahz fired and floored the creature.

  If its lurching walk hadn’t blocked my view, Cahz thought, I wouldn’t have known it was there until it had taken a chunk out of me!

  Cahz was interrupted from his train of thought by a voice over his radio.

  “Boss, this is Bates. I’m running dry and there’s no let-up.”

  Cahz toggled his mic. “Angel, have you got eyes on the other survivors?”

  The creatures were converging on the town square in the thousands and Cahz realised he could no longer see the other survivors in the mass of zombies.

  There was a silent gulf on the radio. “Angel, come in,” Cahz said.

  “Lieutenant, I have situation,” came Angel’s belated response.

  * * *

  Behind Angel, on the roof of the office block, there came the sound of splintering wood. The door to the stairwell cracked open, spraying rotten wood onto the gravel. From the darkness of the abandoned building stumbled out a stream of corpses.

  “Otyebis!”

  Angel whipped round, sending a shower of loose stones tumbling from the rooftop. Incorporating the energy from her twist, Angel leapt to her feet, swinging her sniper rifle over her back as she did. She delved into her holster and pulled out a pistol to take up her new firing position. Leaning forward as if she were about to sprint, Angel aimed her gun.

  The zombies’ lethargic attention slowly focused on the human.

  She pulled the trigger, obliterating the lead zombie’s skull.

  The presence of live prey galvanised the undead and they started shambling towards her.

  Angel opened fire in earnest.

  Her gun barked with each squeeze of the trigger. Like a drum beat, Angel fired a steady rhythm of deadly shots. Within a few short seconds fifteen zombies lay decapitated.

  Angel discarded the empty clip and reloaded her weapon all in one fluid motion. Again she fired until her clip was dry, destroying the next fifteen zombies that stumbled through the door. The bottleneck caused by the locked door dealt with, they were less bunched up now, but there were still too many. Inexorably they shuffled towards her, torn flesh hanging from their outstretched arms and rasping moans surging from their stiff throats.

  Again Angel changed her clip with the automatic action ingrained in her muscle memory. She pointed the gun at the closest ghoul but they were emerging from the stairwell faster than she could shoot them.

  “Fucking pointless.”

  She holstered her gun, turned, and threw herself off the building.

  Three floors down the line snapped taut against its anchor. Angel’s harness jolted against the tension, sending a shockwave juddering through her body. The rope took the force of Angel’s sudden stop and, pivoting against the lip of the roof, transferred what was left of her downward force into lateral movement. Stunted by the jolt, Angel
could do nothing as her momentum carried her. She swung and bounced hard against the toughened glass of a manager’s office. As she hit something snapped. A deluge of pain coursed through her arm. Blackness and nausea pressed in around her consciousness. Light headed, dazed and hurting, she could feel herself slipping into oblivion.

  “Pizdets,” slipped from her pursed lips as she asserted her will over the pain.

  Angel hung suspended by her safety harness, stunned by pain and gently twisting while she cradled her left arm. From the corner of her eye something dark hurtled towards her. She looked up in time to see a hapless zombie plummeting straight down. Angel strained her stomach muscles to give her the tilt she needed to get in tight to the building.

  It was too late. Something hard and bony connected with Angel’s cheek and raked down her shoulder and back.

  A stifled scream of pain forced its way through Angel’s gritted teeth.

  Her cheek felt raw from the collision. The burning welt from the impact had overwhelmed much of her feeling and she had to know if she was bleeding. If the zombie had broken the skin she knew she would be infected. In absolute terror, she touched her fingertips to the skin on the side of her face.

  The skin was tender but dry.

  In spite of the pain, Angel felt relief.

  She looked up about to give praise to the heavens when she saw the next free falling corpse.

  Through its clouded eyes, the plummeting corpse, oblivious to its predicament, lashed out at its target. Having missed, it tumbled downwards, hurtling to the ground. In its retarded mind it had no thought of the impact just moments away. It simply stared up plaintively at the meal it was powerless to obtain.

  More zombies stumbled over the edge or were pushed by the eager mass behind them.

  Angel’s fingers grasped out and found a beam of steelwork to lever herself up with, muscles straining and pain throbbing from her elbow as she kicked down with her feet, righting herself. Twisting round, she pulled herself flat against the grime-coated glass, away from the macabre downpour.

  Panting, she hugged tight to the window frame. The stream of bodies was easing off and below her was a heap of rotten flesh. Most of the corpses had been immobilised from their fall but a few splintered carcasses writhed as they tried to move on smashed bones. Occasionally there could be seen a zombie’s jaw gnashing in frustration at its spine-shattered paralysis.

  Angel’s breathing sent plumes of condensation streaking out across the window. She forced herself to take deeper, slower breaths; to calm herself down and sit out the worst of the pain from her arm. From the corner of her eye she saw a dark shape, but this time it wasn’t falling from above.

  Thump.

  The whole window shuddered as a zombie bit down on Angel’s face. Angel tensed and in one primordial reaction she had pushed herself away from the building in sheer fright.

  The zombie’s slavering mouth continued to gnaw down at where Angel’s face had been, either unaware or unperturbed by the sheet of glass that separated them. Thick rivers of black saliva trickled down the inside of the glass. The woman’s white work blouse had long ago been stained yellow, her shoulder-length brown hair was feral and oily and the ragged and fractured nails that clawed at the glass still had patches of red varnish in places. But the one thing to steal Angel’s attention was the eyes. Clouded like a cataract sufferer, they were wide open as she sunk her teeth into the window.

  Even a shark rolls its eyes when it bites, Angel thought as she began her descent to the ground.

  * * *

  Cahz looked up at the office block in cold silence. The last of the lemming-like zombies had plunged to their doom and Angel was painfully making her way to the ground before he realised he’d been holding his breath. He knew there was nothing he could have done to help Angel; the cadre sniper always acted alone and away from the team.

  That didn’t diminish his responsibility or his concern for his comrade. In the few seconds since Angel’s radio call, Cahz had been torn between watching out for her and scanning for the survivors lost in the throng of cadavers.

  He took in a lungful of rancid air, which peaked his own sense of danger. None of the three men had emerged from the crowd and the mob of undead were now only a few shambling footsteps from his position. He breathed out the rank air, his decision made. Three more casualties among the billions.

  “Okay people, time to bug out. Everyone back to the bird.”

  As he turned to run back to the chopper, Cahz noticed that Angel had stopped one floor from the ground. Below her were half a dozen necrotic arms outstretched, waiting for her.

  Before he could order one of his men to help, Angel had unholstered her pistol and dispatched the group. Her shots looked clumsy compared to what Cahz had come to expect. A couple of shots had missed their target before he realised what was wrong. For some reason Angel was firing right handed.

  “Cahz, we’ve a problem,” Idris’ voice crackled over the radio from the chopper.

  Cahz turned round and slapped his buddy, the hulk of a soldier everyone called Cannon, on the shoulder. He nodded and both men jogged back to the chopper.

  Around the chopper stood the group of dishevelled survivors. Idris was obviously shouting through the window from the pilot’s seat at Bates, but from here the sound of the blades and the music from the ghetto blaster drowned out the conversation. Looking back at the office block, Cahz could see that Angel was down and hobbling towards the landing zone.

  “Cannon, go give Angel a hand.” Cahz gestured in the sharpshooter’s direction.

  “You got it.” The big man sprinted off with an agility and speed not generally associated with most men his size, let alone for someone carrying a heavy machine gun and a thousand rounds of ammo.

  “What’s the problem?” Cahz asked as he drew level with the helicopter’s open window.

  The survivors were in a tight knot around the chopper. The two ragged young men looking anxiously around. The skinny young woman with dirty blond hair bent double and retching, a young girl diligently rubbing her back, and an older woman who was trying unsuccessfully to shush the baby in her arms.

  “Are you counting heads?!” Idris shouted above the noise of the engine and the sound of the baby’ crying.

  Cahz looked at the survivors and then back at the seats in the chopper. “Ah, shit!”

  * * *

  Sarah stepped in front of the man who was obviously in charge. Through raw breaths, cheeks flushed, she panted, “Where are the others?”

  “I’m sorry, ma’am. I waited as long as I could,” Cahz said in way of an answer.

  Sarah knew what he meant. She looked back along the street she and her companions had ran down. There were hundreds of zombies, all walking towards the chopper, but no sign of her missing companions.

  Cahz rapped his fingers against the side of the chopper as he thought aloud, “Could we get everyone onboard and try to find somewhere safe to set down?”

  “Where?” Idris asked. “Look, we couldn’t get airborne with the extra weight even if you could cram everyone in. And if we could take off, where would we get the extra fuel we’d need to get back to Ishtar?”

  “What’s the problem?” Sarah asked, overhearing part of the discussion.

  “Ma’am, the chopper only seats five, maybe six at a squeeze,” Cahz explained.

  “And there are ten of us,” Sarah said, still trying to compose herself.

  “Don’t suppose the girl and the baby will be a problem. They can sit on someone’s knee.” Cahz looked around nervously. All the time they stood there the zombies were edging closer. He knew he had to make a decision—and quick—before they were overrun.

  Big Cannon trotted up, carrying the sniper’s kit with Angel only a few paces behind. Cahz knew her injury must be serious because she never let anyone near her rifle.

  Unconcerned by the new arrivals, Sarah continued, “That still leaves us four seats short.”

  “What’s the hold-up b
oss?” Cannon asked.

  “The kids’ll fit in fine, but we’re pushing the weight limit,” Idris chipped in, confirming Cahz’s assumption. “We’ve got enough fuel for the five of us and a few of the pus-bags, but they weigh next to nothing. Even if we do stuff this bird full, we’ll be short on fuel. Okay, there’s no drag if we don’t use the net, but we’ll still splash down who knows how short of the ship. And what if the weather turns and we meet a strong headwind? We’ll just ditch a whole lot sooner.”

  Nathan spoke up. “Could some of us get carried in the cargo net?”

  “No, we can’t take the weight or the drag, son.” Idris tried not to sound too annoyed at repeating himself.

  “Anyways, you’d die of exposure before we got back to the ship,” Bates said. “It’s bad enough just getting winched up, but being under that thing for two hundred miles? No way you’d make it.”

  “No need for a seat for me dear,” came Elspeth’s soft voice.

  Everyone looked round at the unassuming old woman.

  “What do you mean?” Sarah asked.

  Elspeth pulled her collar loose to reveal a set of teeth marks over her shoulder. The wound wasn’t deep, but it had broken the skin and drawn blood.

  “No,” Sarah wept.

  “I’m sorry I couldn’t protect her.” A tear trickled down Elspeth’s cheek as she gazed down at the bundle she cradled in her arms.

  Ryan reached over and pulled away a corner of the swaddling. There was a smudge of blood on the yellowed cloth. The child, only a few months old, was crying. Its face was red and its bottom lip quivered as it gasped out wails. Across the baby’s face was the drag marks of a zombie’s scratch. The welts were puffy and red with infection.

  “Oh God no, Elspeth,” Sarah gasped.